Oh brother, new Bible could revive gender war

Major Bible publisher Zondervan has put out a new translation, available online now and in print next spring. However, many evangelicals (the target market) recall critics came after the last loudly-touted new translation with torches and pitchforks, claiming the so-called gender-neutral text of Today's New International Bible would lead souls astray by distorting or dropping God-given language, particularly gender pronouns.

The TNIV was greeted with horror by traditionalists and scholars. Wayne Grudem, author of The TNIV and the Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy and a professor of the Bible and theology at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Ariz., spotted 3,000 places where words such as "man," "father," "son," "brother" and "he" vanished.

The T-TNIV promptly tanked in the market and last year, translators and Zondervan announced they would be redoing that modern language version (once advertised in Rolling Stone in a bid for hipster attention) in time for spring 2011. During the September 2009 announcement, all anyone wanted to ask about was gender politics.

Reporters asked,

Will there be women on the translating committee? They'd like more but there is one among more than a dozen men right now. Will there be translators from the "Global South" (code for conservative evangelicals from Africa and South America)? Yes, there's a new committee member from India.

What about "social pressures" to lean the text this way or that on homosexuality, on women, or on masculine and feminine references to God and God's people?

This time, Wheaton College Bible scholar Doug Moo, head of the translation committee, told Bob Smietana of the Nashville Tennessean they listened to critics and ...

We tried to be careful about not bowing to any cultural or ecclesiastical agenda. We also talked to anyone who wanted to talk to us.

Even so, Smietana writes that Denny Burk, a professor of New Testament at Boyce College, a Southern Baptist school in Louisville, zeroed in on the BibleGateway.com blog that 1 Timothy 2:12 had been altered in favor of egalitarianism -- the idea that men and women are eligible for all roles in life, not for complementary separate-but-equally valued spheres of influence as many conservative evangelicals believe the Bible says. .

Burk points out:

That verse from a New Testament letter from the Apostle Paul, used to read, "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man." Now it says, "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man."

The change from "have authority" to "assume authority" is huge, Burk argues. He believes that God gave men and women different jobs and that women can't be pastors. Burk says the new Bible sides with his opponents.

For people who take their Bible word for word truth, this is no simple matter.

Will you be scrutinizing the new Bible, hanging on to your current one -- or wondering where that Bible is buried somewhere in the house?

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About Cathy Lynn Grossman

Cathy Lynn Grossman is too fidgety to meditate. But talking about visions and values, faith and ethics lights her up. Join in at Faith & Reason. More about Cathy.